Angry Planet - America’s Fight in the Red Sea

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

Since the middle of December, a U.S.-led coalition has been trading munitions with Houthis in Yemen. The day after Christmas, USS Dwight D. Eisenhower began participating in strikes against targets along the coast. It hasn’t left since and the conflict between a group of international allies and the Houthis has continued.On this episode of Angry Planet, former fighter pilot and current YouTuber Ward Carroll sits down to walk us through the ins and outs of Operation Prosperity Guardian. The conversation was recorded on February 20, 2023, and as Carroll predicted, the conflict remained remarkably static in the weeks that followed.That changed on March 5, when a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile struck the M/V True Confidence, killing three. Did the Houthis Cut Internet Cables in the Red Sea?The fighter pilots hunting Houthi drones over the Red SeaWard’s initial thoughts on the "ace" Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Hey there, Angry Planet listeners, Matthew here. Just got a little programming note up here at the top. This is a conversation with Ward Carroll. It is mostly about Operation Prosperity Guardian, which I always want to call Operation Prosperity Gospel,

probably because I'm from the South. Setting that aside. It was recorded on February 20th, but going through it, listening to it, editing it, it is remarkable how the state of the conflict and how it is conducted it and the players involved have been remarkably static over the course of the two weeks since this was recorded, remarkably static. With the added context that on March 5th, a Houthi anti-ship ballistic missile struck the, bulk carrier true confidence. It killed three people and injured for others. Ward has actually just released a video that is all about this, so I will share that in the show notes so you can catch up with him on his thoughts on what's just happened.

This is a big deal because these deaths are the first of commercial ship mariners related to Operation Prosperity Guardian, and it remains to be seen how that will change. the terror of this conflict. But beyond that, the conflict has not changed a whole lot over the past two weeks. So, kind of with that added context, here we go.

So I wanted to start today kind of picking up the throat of our conversation from last week, from a phone call we'd had. I see that you have released your own video on it on your YouTube channel. By the way, we introduce yourself and tell us what you do?

I'm Ward Carroll and I run a YouTube channel called Ward Carroll and it mostly deals with military aviation which is a function of the fact I spent 20 years

as an F-14 radar intercept officer so Maverick and Goose I was Goose. And after that I spent a number of years in the digital media space. It's the editor of military.com out in San Francisco

and another military website called We Are the Mighty in L.A., which was founded by a couple of MTV alums. They wanted to do a military affinity site. So I was their first editor-in-chief and worked for a not-for-profit on the Naval Academy grounds here where I live in Annapolis called the Naval Institute. And then in the meantime, I started the channel. And it started kind of slow and then exploded about four months into it.

And it was one of those things where I really didn't have a choice. Plus, I was a terrible employee, you know, once the channel took off. Because my mind was always on episodes and replying to comments. And I actually went to the CEO and said, you really got to fire me because I'm a terrible teammate here. and I left on good terms. A great organization, the Naval Institute. Been around since 1873, formed by the guy who was the commanding officer of the monitor during the Civil War.

Because after the Civil War, the Navy was going south, and he wasn't happy about it. So they wrote these papers and put them all together in a pamphlet that became a magazine called Proceedings, is the second longest running periodical in the United States. States behind the Atlantic. So anyway, that's me. Now I kind of want to do an episode that is the sole searching of the American Navy post-Civil War. That's the whole other episode.

Yeah, well, there's a lot to talk about there, for sure. What happened to We Are the Mighty? I remember them. It's still around. They've had to sort of reconfigure themselves and figure out where there are places among all these military affinity properties, not websites anymore. Yeah. You know, the original idea that David Gale had, and David was the president of MTV Films for 18 years,

and a fantastic gent. And so he poached me, poached, I was ready to go, but he got me from military.com, so I left San Francisco, went to Hollywood, and they were right there on Hollywood Boulevard. You know, it was like a Guns and Roses video. I got off the bus and, you know, was met by this guy with a shady look on his eye, and he's like, welcome, you know, to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. And we launched this property with an All-Star team. I got, my executive editor was a guy from another military site, and, you know, we were the cool new thing for a while, and the word was out, and we had a rapid rise.

And then it gets hard, you know, after the initial success, now it's like, okay, how do we sustain this? How do we monetize this? How do we keep this talented group together? you know, just like in rock and roll supergroups last one album, maybe two albums, and then break up, you know, because everybody's got an idea of what it should be and it's hard to build consensus. So that's kind of what happened there. But a good friend of mine, Mark Harper, took over as the president. They were acquired by Sightline that has gobbled up a bunch of military properties or properties in general. It's the model of aggregating these individual URLs under one umbrella.

And it's not a commentary on the site. But generally, the companies that do that have little interest in raising the bar of quality and satisfaction for the staff. But Mark has done a lotable job of keeping the lights on. They're in Hollywood. They're literally in Hollywood. the office is right under the Hollywood sign. And, you know, they do events. They help third parties with their media needs. And but also it's still around. If you go to Wear the Mighty.com, they do content creation in the old website sort of format.

Some of it is daily reportage. Some of it is history. Some of it is listicles and kind of whimsy. But the original vision was to kind of be the BuzzFeed for the military. And that's when BuzzFeed was red hot in, you know, like 2015 time frame. In fact, they just opened that gigantic studio right there in Hollywood. But the landscape has changed dramatically, but they're still around. Very similar story to what happened to me at war is boring.

This is another one of these sites. The guy in charge sold it to a, consolidation company. And now it turns out basically like wire stories and op-eds and listicles and two diminishing traffic returns as the web dies around us. I know, I know David very well. Yes, he's actually the one that put, he gave me your email actually. Oh, okay.

So I was like, I need a, I need a guy to tell me if something is an ace or not. Yeah, David, David worked for me as a freelancer when I was at Military.com, which is kind of the original conception of military digital media. It's pre-social media even. You know, this was 2005. There's still a lot of great stuff on military.com. Yeah, they invested in their reporting team against all odds. Sarah Blancet, who was the PR chief when I was there, rose up to be the executive in chief

working for Monster, the parent company. And, you know, acquisitions are always, you know, hard. And that's not just a commentary on Monster. I didn't have a whole lot of fun with Monster when I was there. And the founders didn't have a whole lot of fun with Monster. Monster's gone through a lot of change. You talk about where are they now? Monster is a good example of that because they owned the digital hiring space at one time.

And now it's like, are they even in the conversation anymore, right? Yeah, I would have never even thought. Right? And, I mean, if you think about them early aughts, they were it. So anyway, Sarah and the chain of command there had enough trust in their reportage that they really did hire a bunch of franchise players. And so that reportage, the original byline piece of Military.com, remains their signature, and they do well with that.

Well, let's, let's get to the reason I called you the other day, which was that, as you said in one of your recent YouTube videos, there's been reporting that there is a new ace, the first ace in a very long time since 1991, right? Or at least that's what some of the defense blogs are saying. And that is not quite the whole story. Yeah. So, I mean, that's it. He's, the 1991 is the last time somebody got a mig, right? but an ace equals 5x. So that goes back to Vietnam.

You know, the Navy, last Navy ace was Duke Cunningham, who obviously fell from Grace during his time as a congressman, actually served time in prison for taking bribes, which diminished his icon status as a naval aviator, unfortunately. But Duke and the... And then an Air Force pilot named Ritchie were the two aces, the last aces in the American military. Since that time, there have been onesies and twosies of kills, right? The last one was actually, and I want to say, 2011, 2012 in Syria, a U.S. Navy Super Hornet

shot down a Syrian mig, and I think it was a Meg 21. And you know, one off. So the is he a ace or not question didn't come up. So but now,

to your point, we have at least one. And I'm guessing there's probably more that just haven't revealed themselves in theater. Because there's been a lot of drones flying around, as well as ballistic missiles, anti-ship missiles, which kind of come under

the same header. If you can shoot down a drone and you shoot down a ballistic missile, those are kind of the same unmanned lethal weapon kind of thing. And so this guy we're talking about was a Marine Corps captain named, what's his name? Earhart? No, that's not. Yeah, yeah, Earhart. Something like that.

It is. It's, uh, Earl, Captain Earl Earhart is a Marine Corps Harrier pilot aboard the USS baton, which is LHD, which is a helicopter carrier. There's a rough sort of analogy for what that ship is. It's an amphibious assault ship, a small carrier that can operate short takeoff and landing fixed wing assets like the AV8 and now the, airplane that's replacing the AV8 is the vertical takeoff and landing version of the F-35, the F-35B.

But Baton doesn't have F-35Bs. Baton still has Harriers. The Harrier has been around forever. I went to high school. I lived on base at the Marine Corps station at Cherry Point in the early mid-70s when the Harrier was brand new for the Marine Corps. and that was the A version, a really hard airplane to fly, a lot of mishaps, a lot of pilots killed in 1975. And so they designed, they being McDonnell Douglas, designed a new variant of the AV8 with the cooperation of Hawker Sidley,

which was the British manufacturer of the original Harrier, and took out some of the problems. And specifically, they put a computer in. interface between the throttle so that the pilot couldn't mismanage those and cause the airplane to flip over at low altitude. So that airplane has been around for a long time. The one they're flying now is the AV8 B2 plus. And so the B2 plus has an air-to-air radar that makes it a fighter, because here two-four, it was mostly an attack airplane, a bomber, not an air-to-air platform. It could fire sidewinders, sort of semi-indiscriminately, but with this APG-65 that the Harriers got from their squad or, you know, sister service Hornets, the F-18C's upgraded to the APG-73, which

left this inventory of APG-65s. They lengthened the nose and the Harrier and gave it some other, you know, HUD displays and different things that made it into an overnight air-to-air platform where the pilot had some situation awareness, and he knew what he was shooting at. What does semi-indiscriminately mean? Well, meaning I have a tone, but I don't know what I'm shooting at. Okay. Right? So you would get an oral tone, which means I have a heat signature,

but I don't have any queuing in my heads-up display that says that tone is on that airplane that I intend to shoot, which in a multi-banded environment is not a good thing because you might be shooting the wrong thing. But now in the HUD, you know, they get symbology that shows what you're locked on with the aim 9, the sidewinder, the heat-seeking missile. So they can carry sidewinder. They can also carry Amram, the aim 120, which is a medium-range active missile. So it goes active, meaning it does not need radar support right off the rail. And it's also a medium-range 25 miles plus kind of a,

kind of a weapon where the sidewaters a two-mile, you know, sort of weapon. And then it has a gun. So those are the three things it could use, the Harrier could use to shoot down a drone or whatever. So we were aware through Fifth Fleet and Centcom, U.S. Central Command, that has cognizance over the Red Sea Gulf of Aden, Persian Gulf, that there had been some fixed-wing assets that it shot down hoothy drones, hoothy ballistic missiles, because they tweeted it, right?

And then we found out other reportage that specifically what sort of weapons I heard in the wind that they were actually using Amram. That surprised me, that they would use that very expensive missile against a, you know, drone. But they're not really using them against drones.

They're using the Amram against the ballistic missiles, which can travel upwards of Mach 5. So that gives the, crew about 15 plus seconds to make a decision. Same with the destroyers that are out there. So there's a very small window to make the call to engage. So it's very laudable what they're doing in terms of the rules of engagement and how their operational conditions that they're always in to be able to tackle this threat that's persistent and ongoing and actually getting worse. You know, And so, but what we found out through this BBC interview, that before the USS Eisenhower got on station in the Red Sea in November, I'm thinking, is when they got there.

Because when they went on deployment, it wasn't clear where they would go, whether they were going to help out the USS Gerald R. Ford and the Eastern Med, just to keep the Israel Hamas, war contained. That was the original thought, maybe you need two carriers instead of just one. Or would they backfill where Ford had been and helped fight the Ukraine war in the Adriatic? Or would they go just straight through the mad, through the Suez Canal, into the Red Sea, which is what they wound up doing. But before they got there, there was fixed-wing aircraft operating off of a U.S. Navy warship, and that was the USS Baton. The baton was the head of this amphibious ready group, ARG. And so, again, through this BBC article, we find out that in October, Captain Earhart and his squadermates were engaging drones, you know,

with impunity and with great frequency. And that, in fact, he had tallied seven kills, which introduces the question, okay. So is Captain Earhart an ace? And as you and I were talking, you know, everybody's first prima facie response, historians, you know, military aviation historians and purists and veterans and guys from the fighter community are like, no, that's an ace. He's shooting at an unmanned aircraft, you know, air vehicle doesn't qualify. I think you compared it to, in World War II, if you were flying along a V2 rocket and nudging it out of the sky. Yes. Or shooting observation balloons during World War I. Right. So, but subsequent to our conversation, I did some digging for my episode. And the answer is a little less clear than my prima facie response.

I was very, it was super fascinating to work on this because it was, there were so many different terms and depending on who you talk to at different times, ACE means different things, which I assume you're about to get into. Yeah. So, right. And, and, you know, when this conversation comes up, I think, you know, guys like you and me assume there is some structure. You know, I mean, we've had ACEs since 1914. routine, you know, and then you start to dig into it and you realize, oh, there are none, right? There really aren't any rules necessarily. Okay, so the best that I could find, and this is, I turned to my good friend and well-known, well-regarded naval aviation historian Barrett Tillman. Barrett's written a whole bunch of books on all wars, but particularly he's known for his expertise of the carrier war in World War II in the Pacific. So he's like, hey, the American Fighter Aces Association has a definition, and it reads as follows.

An American fighter ace is a U.S. citizen who has served honorably as a fighter pilot and a U.S. military service. or the service of a nation not at war with the United States, who has destroyed five or more enemy aircraft in aerial combat. End of statement. Okay, so seems clear enough, except when you look at, you know, the UK fighter ace rolls from World War II, it includes the tail gunner in a tempest, or a defiant, rather, and that guy we're talking about that tipped V1 buzz bombs with the wing of his spitfire.

V1s, not V2s. V2s would presumably have been moving too fast at the time. My apologies. Yeah, V1s, which were subsonic and, you know, Gen 1 jet propulsion. So they would just fly up next to it and give it a little nudge with the wing, and it would spin out of control, the gyro would come uncaged, and it would just fall away.

And so what I learned during the course of researching this is at once, the guy who did that, whose name is Raymond Headley Clapperton, the Spitfire Pilot, the REF Spitfire Pilot, is considered an ace, but also there's an asterisk where he's not really an ace. in the same breath. It's like, yes, he's on this list of World War II aces, but he's not really considered an ace, just like the tail gunner,

whose name is Frederick James Barker in that defiant, who has six kills, to his credit, from the tailgun facing the wrong way, shooting at Messerschmitts. And so it's confusing. So what I did in that episode was came up with some sort of subsets of the definition of an ace.

I went alpha through delta because not only is it confusing because of the existence of buzz bombs and tailgunners, you know, what if you're a chin bubble B-17 guy and you shoot down five? Are you an ace? I think that should

qualify, right? So it's sort of like, okay, when you and I think of an ace, we're thinking the assumption around that is that it was a manned fighter against a manned fighter with mutual intent, knights of the air, you know, you're turning on me, I'm turning on you, high g, swirling, you know, pulling for the other guy's tail, you know, red barren version, versus Snoopy kind of stuff, right? And the best pilot would win. And the best pilot, if he did that five times, ten times, you know, we had some incredible amount of kills during World War II.

And a high number during the Korean War. You know, that was the golden age of jet warfare, Mig Alley, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy, Aces, going against we thought they were just North Korean pilots but it turns out they were also Russian pilots

and that came out years later classified information that was released in fact I interviewed a guy at the Tail Hook Convention a couple years ago named Royce Williams who got a silver star

for shooting down five Russian flown migs and it should have been the Medal of Honor so there's been a petition to get it upgraded to the Medal of Honor this year it was upgraded to the Navy Cross, which isn't, it's just below the Medal of Honor,

but, you know, Royce was fighting Russians, not North Koreans off of, I think he was on Princeton, was the carrier he was on in the icy, you know, China Sea. So that, you know, Meg on, you know, F-9 or Meg on F-86 or P-51 on BF-F-1. 109, yeah, you do that five times, ace, right? Just like Spad versus Fawker triplane. And they're like, well, okay, what if you're the guy who takes out Yamamoto? And he's just flying along the jungle tree tops, like trying to get away. And there's a gun, but it's not manned.

And you just roll on them with impunity, you know, that, if you do that five times, you an ace, how about if you should have? a helicopter down, right? In Desert Storm, the first day of the war, a friend of mine named Nick Mongo Mangilo got a mig, Big 21. And then the last day of the war, the only Tomcat kill happened. It was a sidewinder against an Iraqi helicopter flying probably may not have even been aware that there's a Tomcat above him about to shoot him down. Right. So if Mongo did what he did five times, shoots five Meg-21s, and then the Tomcat crew from VF1 does what they did five times, they're both aces. But in the annals of history, is that the same thing? It doesn't feel the same to me.

It doesn't feel the same, right? So now we introduce drones, unmanned, and the picture is even more complicated. Especially because drones cover such a wide gamut of stuff, too, right? Yeah. Yes. Yes. And the technology is iterating so quickly, you know, before we know it, there will be drones with air-to-air, you know, lethality.

I mean, they can carry sidewriters already. You know, a Reaper can carry a sidewinder. And, you know, the CIA and the Air Force has used reapers since the 9-11 wars, you know, a lot. I mean, we just used it to kill that, that, the Republican Guard guy, the RGC guy there and back. The RGCI. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with one of the knife hell fires. Yes, yes. So, you know, these are being.

flown by, you know, CA guys at Langley or Air Force officers in the desert in a trailer, you know, creche or wherever they are. And, you know, there's been a lot of coverage over the years, these things. You know, there's a little league coach that spends the day killing bad guys. And then he's, you know, there on the field as a normal suburban, you know, guy, a deacon at church. And, you know, it's just a very 21st century sort of form of war. So if he shoots down five airplanes, is he an ace in that way? Or if I'm a hairier guy that shoots down five drones,

and we're talking about these are these Iranian-built suicide drones, one-way drones, very slow. They might go 60 knots. The Shaheed. Yeah, Shaheed, right. They have other more high-tech drones, But generally they're just throwing these things, and they're in these racks. They just launch off, you know, rapid fire and just they're not indiscriminate, but they're programmed to go to something.

Or because the ships are radiating, they have a, you know, EW signature that the search radars on the coast of Yemen can find out they can be directed to those things. They hit and they explode. We've seen the damage of those Shaheeds is sort of minimal. You know, they're like, take a. out a boarding ladder or stain the side of the island or that sort of thing. It's more of an irritant than something that's going to sink a ship. But the threat is real. You know, meanwhile, these ballistic missiles can do real damage. In fact, yesterday, we had a British-owned commercial ship that had to be abandoned. It didn't sink, but that's the first one that's

actually had to be abandoned. So the Houthis are getting smarter and so forth and so on. So the idea that we have air cover, be it from... standard missiles fired off early bird class destroyers or super hornets from carrier air wing three or before they got there, harriers off of the baton air combat element. You know, that's something that these assets have had to sort of evolve into. They've had to pivot into this mission. I guarantee you when Eisenhower left port, they hadn't trained for this. This wasn't something that they'd done during the turnaround at all, starting with the training you do at Fallon and all the other workups, spring training, as it were.

But they have done a really laudable job of picking up with what was necessary with respect to this mission. It's very demanding. So I'm agnostic as to whether Captain Earhart is an ace or not. He's certainly a great pilot, you know. Being in the right place at the right time with the right weapon to take down a drone is not easy. And then you do it seven times. That's laudable. So you can say he's a drone ace.

That's the term I would be comfortable with. You know, he's certainly not an ace like Robin Olds or Eddie Rickenbocker or Butch O'Hare. You know, and I don't think anybody would quibble with that. I don't think Captain Earhart would demand. he, you know, have a statue right there next to those guys. Right. And to be clear, the BBC reporting, he did not call himself an ace. The BBC report didn't use the word ace. It was everyone else afterwards looking at it and calling him an ace. Yeah, good point. Yeah. And so these are the fanboy, you know, websites. And, you know, God bless him.

They take their facts seriously. And, you know, I do gut check my scripts, my coverage against some of these guys. None of them flew military airplanes for a living before they pivoted into the trade press space. But you're correct. That's a good thing to point out that, you know, Cap Mayer Hart didn't say, it's great to be an ace. I'm going to get a vanity plate when I get home. You know, or BBC didn't say, and he's the first day since, you know, this guy shot down 24, you know, V-1s in World War I during the Battle of Britain. So, yeah.

All right, Angry Planet listeners. We're going to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. Welcome back, Angry Planet listeners. We were back on with Ward Carroll. The other thing I really thought was interesting about this story was that it gives us a good view into what the, conflict against the Houthis looks like. And I wonder if you can kind of take me through

what American military assets are there, what exactly they're doing, and kind of what the overall game plan is and how it's working out. That's a big question. Yeah. So let's go back to the war between the wars, which is what the Navy fights.

And this predates the October 7th, you know, terror attack on the kibbutzies of Southern. in Israel. It's, it postdates the war in Iraq, particularly, the American, you know, hot war from 03 on. And it's what has remained as, as we pulled out of Kabul back in 20, what was that, 22, 2022. And so the American Navy patrols those wars.

waters. Particularly, we have CTFs, which are combined task forces that are often comprised of Arlie Burke class destroyers, which is a guided missile destroyer. And it turns out that that weapon system is perfect for this threat. And so these crews have a lot of experience with getting shot at by the Houthis in recent years. This is not the first time, or this isn't the first era of this proxy war that the U.S. Navy has fought. So when we're patrolling those waters, under the auspices of keeping the sea lanes free, which is what the U.S. Navy is designed to do, they're on the step. They're at the ready. It's not General Quarter. because that would be exhausting.

But they're in operational condition three. So they have missiles on rails, missiles in, vertical launch cell tubes. Their close-in-weapon system is armed and ready to go. They have their helicopter ready to go if there are small boats that come out. And they're working with the cruiser, you know, the Normandy, the Philippine Sea, a larger class of air warfare ship. And in this case, they're working with the carrier strike group, which is the aircraft carrier Eisenhower.

So there's coordination between all these assets. You have partners, not NATO partners. The Pentagon freaks out if you say NATO, because this is not a NATO op. Local partners. Yeah, yes, exactly. So we've called this thing Project Prosperity, Guardian, Operation Prosperity Guardian.

That's the defensive one. And then the offensive one was called Poseidon Archer. The Siden Archer. Yeah, that was the label it was given maybe semi-informally anecdotally to the strikes that we did into Yemen

that included R.EF. Typhoons from Akhtiri, Cyprus. And so post-9-11 more acutely, the CTS were consolidated and the threat ramped up, starting with a ballistic missile that was shot from Yemen that apparently was on its way to Israel. They were shot down by the USS Carney. Now it was the first, like, good work, you guys. and we kind of thought that was going to be like one and done. And then they kept coming.

And then they're shooting at commercial shipping. Oilers, tankers, container ships. And under the auspices that were protecting our Palestinian brothers, as long as this siege of Gaza is going on, this genocide, we're going to be doing our part here down at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula. and we will target commercial shipping, going through the Bob Elmandeb Straits, through the Red Sea, towards the Suez. But it turns out they're firing more indiscriminately than that.

And so now the U.S. Navy with our partners, including India, the Netherlands, Australia, UK. Off the top of my mind, those are some of the countries that jump out at me. France has some craft there are coordinating a defensive posture to knock these weapons down as they're headed for

mostly commercial shipping but occasionally they'll actually go after an American warship and the HMS Diamond, a British worship. So you know, first is like if you don't knock it off we're going to ramp it up, Houthis, and they didn't knock it off. So we did one round of TELOC and cruise missile strikes. That didn't stop them.

Then, okay, now he'll come fixed wing assets dropping J-DAM and GB24 bunker busters and what the typhoons use, which is precision guided munitions using their flare pods. and working against a target list, right? So launchers, storage facilities, counter-regime, counter-military targets, and so forth and so on. So we're dropping hundreds of weapons on dozens of targets, and it doesn't appear to be having any measurable effect on their ability to wage this war of harassment

against primarily shipping, but also against the U.S. military. And so, in fact, yesterday they shot a large amount of weapons at all manner of vessels in the Red Sea, hit that British-owned flag somewhere else. It's always complicated when you get into the merchant marine world. It's crewed by one nation or a amalgamation. of nationalities flagged with one nation and then owned by another nation altogether. So, you know, the number of nations that are affected as a function of that are in the dozens, you know, 40, 50 nations.

It's not just U.S. versus the Houthis. There's a lot. It's the Western world. Nations who care about sea trade versus the, the Houthis. So now, remember, the Houthis fought the Saudis for a number of years, and the Saudis pounded them with artillery, with cruise missiles, with air attacks, and they just seem to bounce back. They've been through this before. They've been through this before. And so, you know, we're hearing reports that people are saying

that the American strikes, the American slash British strikes have had no effect on their ability to shoot weapons into the Red Sea because their ordinance depots are all below ground, haven't been touched. The supply chain is sort of just in time coming from Iran, so they really don't have a whole lot sitting around until they're ready to use it. And these launch sites and tracking and tracking and targeting radars are all mobile. So you use it, you fold it up, you take it off the beach, put it in a bunker somewhere, and then when you want to use it again, you're real quick, boom, come up, and we get the information,

and we lob some T-LAM, and we do a strike, and we declare victory against the targets we hit, and the BDA looks like we did good work. And then the very next day we get slammed with another barrage, another fuselage of any shipmisserie. ballistic missiles and attack drones. So this is concerning in that, okay, if what we're doing at this level is not stymieing the threat to the degree that shipping, you know, insurance rates are way up and companies are like,

we'll just go around South Africa, you know, it's too risky to go through the Bob Elmandeb Red Sea. So that affects prices, world markets will be impacted. I think Teslas were like affected when this first was going on and shipping just was held up because they didn't know whether the Americans were going to cover them or not or prosperity guardian assets were going to be able to escort them or not. And it turns out that having a destroyer in company doesn't stop a weapon from hitting your ship. It does provide for a quick response as your ship's on fire, because now you have a damage control team that can come right over and help you fix the damage and maybe mitigate the damage. But if I'm a shipping company, I'm like, I don't want to absorb

missiles every time I go through the Bob Elmandev and the Red Sea in the Gulf of Aden. So our goal, sent com, the National Command Authority, and our partners, along with us, is to to eliminate the Houthi threat, not just mitigate it, eliminate it. So we don't have a good reading from CENTCOM, U.S. Central Command, or the Pentagon. In fact, they're kind of dodgy with their, what has this done, you know, in terms of we've reduced it by X percent, and this is how we're going to get rid of the rest. And, of course, some of that is classified. But I think they're at a loss at this point to figure out whether doing this over time is going to have the intended effect. And so that introduces the question.

Then what? Well, usually in these kinds of situations, we find out that a distance campaign like this does not go well unless backed up by ground. troops, right? Yeah. So that would be the ultimate step, right? But before then, we have to take more deliberate action against the supply chain. And so that means counter-Iranian. So we've kind of been wagging our finger and like, okay, you know, we know you guys,

Ayatollah. So it would be cool if you knocked it off and veiled threats and other threats. and other things. We jammed their intel ship. We did some hacking on their intel ship that was out there giving guidance information to the Houthis. So the next is, okay, praying Manus redux, you know, where we put the lion's share of the Iranian Navy on the bottom of the Persian Gulf in eight hours like we did back in 1988. that's doable. You know, I'm not talking about taking Tehran

because too often people start the saber rattling on the hill starts to sound like let's march on Tehran. Not doable. Never, even if you had to will, it's not feasible. But taking out their combatants,

surface combatants and their submarines that are at Bandra Abbas and Boucher and the other ports along the Persian Gulf and the North Arabian Sea is very doable. What would the Iranian response be unknown? But that would probably be the step we take before we put troops into Yemen to take Sana'a and all the other population centers. And it would be another sort of like particularly, Afghanistan, where we'd get sort of mired in nation building with an asymmetric, you know, sort of Byzantine government, you know.

And so we've proved that's not our strength, really. And, you know, that's iron against clay. And that would be a step we could take. but I think it would be ill-advised. So if what we're doing now and ramping it up proportionally, linearly doesn't work, then we're into a matrix that's going to be tough, put it that way. Because we can do what we do now.

What we're doing now, we can do that over and over again, assuming we have enough standard missiles, AMRAMs, sidewriters, bullets, T-LAMs, which we do, the cost benefit is way out of whack, right? It's a million dollars against $20,000 every time you fire one of those. At best, kind of like what we did

during the post-9-11 war is where we job J-DAM on a Dotson pickup. You know, that's just not, that cost disparity is substantial. And that matters over time. But in the near term, it's like we have the inventory, we have the assets on station. How deep is our bench? Not that deep.

The four destroyers that are on station are going to be there for a while. They have been there for a while. Eisenhower is not going anywhere for a while. That's going to be another nine, ten month deployment when the standard should be six or seven months. You know, that can start to affect manning and retention. and you've got to give sailors an opportunity to be at home, you know, as much as possible, as well as doing their fair share underway. So I know that Navy officials are mindful of these things and are concerned.

As far as what's happening right now, we can shoot down arrows, right? And we say shoot archers, not arrows. So we can also go after archers by doing these strikes, the offensive piece, and take out, you know, we have target sets and we have overhead sensors that go, okay, this, and we have some human intelligence, probably not very robust. But we get word that, okay, they move this to this. And sometimes people like, well, why do, that's obsec. Why did you, or that's an obsequc violation. Why did we tell them we were coming? Because we want to see where this stuff goes.

when they know it's coming and then we'll attack those places the next next time. So there's a method to the madness. We can keep doing that. But already I'm concerned from all this distance away that what we've done so far hasn't stopped it. And in fact, the Huthies seem emboldened. Maybe that's just good PR, you know, a good social media campaign. But they certainly aren't like, please, stop this thing where you're, you know, bombing us, that's not their stance at all. They're emboldened.

And so this is the problem with presence, with, with, you know, something that you want to, we're there to stop the spread. Well, what happens if your presence actually is provocative? What if that becomes the thing? You know, we're not good at like going, you know, us being here is only making it worse. We're going to leave. That's not the American way, you know. We don't do that. That's not what we do. It's not what we do with footprint in terms of outposts and bases and logistics nodes, right? This is what is happening in Syria and Iraq, Jordan.

You know, these are all carryovers, holdovers from the counter ISIS war. And now we're there. We're like, well, let's make sure you guys got freedom and stuff. Yeah, we'll just stick around for a little bit just in case you need this. Because this is what you want, right? Not, you know. And pretty soon the government's like, I don't even have a vote. vote anymore. These guys are the thing that won't leave.

You know, so, you know, again, we're the world's last hope, but we're also part of the problem in too many, too many ways. So this could be one of those things. What if we weren't there? Would the Houthis be shooting at commercial shipping if we weren't there at all? I don't know the answer to that. You know, but certainly now that we are there and they're shooting and they've called our bluff and it's kind of tit for tat or whackamol, you know, this is the kind of thing where these colors don't run kind of a thing, right? So we'll have to see what happens next. I'm concerned.

It's possible that they may have just continued to take pictures and photo of Galaxy Leader over and over again, and that would have been the end of it. That's possible. Yep, that's possible. What did you make of, I don't know if you saw this, just kind of speaking about the perceptions of this whole thing, the young man, the young Huthy man who went aboard galaxy leader and filmed himself and then became kind of a social media sensation, was interviewed all over creation. Did you see this? Yeah, I did. I did. I think they are aware of the power of social media as we are. You know, they had that helicopter. raid, and they were all doing that tribal dance on the deck, and, you know, it shows them bursting into the deck house and, you know, all the Japanese guys are like, oh, don't shoot.

And, you know, it's like, look, we can be tough guys. We can be SEAL Team 6. So it's a source of national pride. If I'm a hootie teen and I aspire to be a badass, I want to believe that my military is capable of these kinds of offensive actions, you know. you probably get sick of hearing how great America is and with all the technology and stuff. When you have one F5 and a few Hueys, you know, and another couple of commercial helicopters that you've painted in khaki, and now you say that they're military aircraft.

So when you can post a run on the board in social media and it goes viral and your reach extends your grasp with that kind of impact, that's... doing it right, 2024 style, right? So now, meanwhile, in the skiffs at Centcom and aboard the USS Isanauer in Bahrain Fifth Fleet headquarters, they're not, that's not their world. They have real data and they know what the BDA is and they know what they know

in terms of how reduced their offensive capability is or not. And so they've, they don't care about my YouTube channel. You know, they're like, if Muge believes that we're sucking, then that's just what we'll have to live with. You know, meanwhile, you know, my good friend, Emma Wyckoff is probably like, yeah, we're good. You know, thanks, we got it.

So, I mean, I keep my ear to the tracks, you know. And when, I mean, Ford, you know, Ford got back. I did an episode aboard Ford a couple weeks ago. And their experience was not the same as the Red Sea. They weren't in the Red Sea. They were in the Eastern Mediterranean. So there's no data there for what we're talking about. So we need either one of the destroyers or the Eisenhower to come home.

I also know the strike group commander, Eremegas, out there very well. He was a lieutenant when I was a lieutenant commander aboard the George Washington in the late 90s. his backstory's cool he was a recon marine enlisted in desert storm and then he became a naval aviator a naval flight officer in the f14 you know he did interservice so he got his commission and joined the navy from the marine corps so he's been around and he's super intense leader really a tough guy i'm very proud of his trajectory but they're probably not coming home anytime soon because it's going to have to be a face-to-face turnover with another aircraft carrier. And we've got Vincent and Reagan in the Western Pacific taking care of the China, don't attack Taiwan thing. So neither of those ships is probably going to leave what we call 7th Fleet and go to 5th Fleet. And the East Coast carriers, the next one to go on cruise is the Harry S. Truman. And that's not how.

happening until summertime, maybe late summertime. So the point is, is Eisenhower may be on station for some months here, which is a commentary on do we have enough aircraft carriers. But it's another, it's another whole other episode. It's a whole other conversation. But for now, we have assets on station that are capable. But to your question, the last part of your, the original question is, What's the end state?

Well, the end state is eliminating Houthi's offensive capability, their ability to wage harassment attacks on shipping. That's the end game. And as we sit here now, looking at SentCom's X-Feed, it doesn't look like we're as far along with that goal as maybe we thought we'd be after all of this offensive, you know, power projection, into Yemen.

I mean, we thought, okay, now you guys are going to get it. Here comes Cag 3 and Tomahawk land attack missiles and just going to throw some typhoons in the mix just to really piss you off and show you that we mean business. And, you know, it's like, have you had enough? And they're like, nope. And they get up and they start firing stuff again. We're like, these guys are just not going to stay on the mat, you know? And so after a while, you're like, in fact, not only they're not staying on the mat,

I don't know how much effect what we're doing is having on any of this. You know, and that's kind of a head scratcher. You know, you're like, at some point they have to run out of weapons or get sick at getting pummeled. Well, I think it's like you said that there's a just-in-time logistics line between them and Iran. Yes, yes, apparently, right? So you can blow up an ammo depot. You can use bunker busters to actually get after those underground things that the Houthis claim haven't been touched. But if it's mostly empty because they don't keep a whole lot of, it's like your local store that doesn't have a whole lot of stuff back in the back room.

What you see on the shelf is what you got. But they have this ability that as soon as that thing runs out, now the truck pulls up and they unload the stuff. you know. And I mean, if you look at your local convenience store, it always seems like there's an 18 wheeler like there. Like, wasn't it here? You know, well, it's because they got a good sort of logistics chain going where there's not a whole lot of inventory. In fact, at your local, you know, whether it's the sheets or Wawa or 7-Eleven, they don't have any storage, right? It's just what you see. And so that's probably a good analog for the way the Houthis are doing their weaponization, their ability to launch offensive weaponry is they don't have any storage really. And the Iranians are like the 18 wheeler that know how to pull up just in time, you know, and keep them supplied. Let me pivot here at the end of our conversation. I ask you a little bit of a sillier question. What is the mooch tally?

So my call sign is mooch. Was mooch? which is mooch. And so, you know, all aviators have a call sign, and you earn it usually by some dubious thing. I got mine during my first deployment. I was out of money in our first court call, Palma, Spain, and one guy at dinner said, you're a mooch, and that's all it took.

Right, so now I'm mooch. and that became my Jedi name for the next, you know, 17 years after that. And the YouTube channel has resurrected that persona. It's like Ben Kenobi is now Obi-Wan Kenobi again, right? And so the Mood's Talley, when I do listicles, ranking episodes, I use the Mood's Talley. and the variables will vary depending on what is the topic. So we'll do the top Aces of Aces or these are the best military movie lines of all time or here are the 12 greatest fighter aircraft of all time.

And then I just did an episode called These are the 10 ugliest military jets ever. I think the word hog, by the way, is very attractive. Okay. And I find it personally offensive that it was on the list. Well, people feel that way, and people also don't like that we had the Vulcan on that list. So I'm working on one now that had overwhelming participation from my subscribers in the community tab of the channel about the 10 most beautiful military jets ever. And we had upwards of a thousand responses. And you'll be happy to know that the Wardhog was considered beautiful.

and the Vulcan was considered beautiful. Now, here's a spoiler. Neither of them made the top 10, but they will be honorable mention in terms of this episode. And the 10, it's not even close. It's like these 10, number one was by far the most voted to be the most beautiful airplane of all time.

And the others were, you know, in there. And it won't be a massive. massive surprise what these 10 are. But the honorable mentioned ones I'm going to put in there because there was a lot of sort of, you know, emotion behind those picks. People, I mean, I don't think people think about ugly as much as they do beautiful. I think people have a, you know, sort of spiritual connection to things they find beautiful. So anyway, the mooch tally is the rack and stack, the data, the science that I use. I like to say that the mooch tally

is an opinion, it's science, which is kind of a tongue in cheek because the variables are sort of squishy sometimes. But that's what the mooch tally is. If I need data or a

quantifiable value to use in an episode that I use the mooch tally. I got in trouble recently with the readers. after the B1B crashed in like January, I called it ugly. And people did not like that.

You think an A10's pretty and a B1's ugly? I have weirdest. I admit that I have weird aesthetics that I like, that I look at things a little bit differently. You're like a steampunk guy. Kind of, yeah. And the other thing about the B1B is there's something sad to me about a bomber like that that had a purpose that was taken away from it?

Well, it was never really used for that purpose. It was never really used for that purpose. That's true. But to have that thing, like, sealed off from it as part of a treaty, it gives it a kind of character that I think is sad. Yeah. Well, so the Mooch Talley, it's sort of the first is beauty, right? The first variable for the beautiful episode is beauty.

So if you were at an air show and you saw an airplane on the flight line for the first time, kind of like seeing a girl across a room, you know, for the first time. Sometimes like, oh, my God, I'm in love kind of a thing, right? That level of beauty. So that's the first one. The second one is, to your point, how was it used operationally? You know, is it just a beauty pageant? You know, once she leaves the pageant, she's kind of useless, you know?

And the warthog was a word. workhorse. Well, that's what I mean. So the ward hog, in the ugly one, the ugginess was mitigated by its operational performance, right? So it didn't rank as high on the ugliness as

the ugliness may have demanded by itself. So in the pretty one, it's like, okay, it's beautiful, how was his operational performance? And then the third variable is, how many subscribers voted for this one, you know, and more so than with the ugly list, the beautiful list is going to be driven by that variable because people really were, you know, passionate about

their choices. And we had a whole bunch. I mean, this morning, I was going through the list, and it took me a long time to tally all of everybody's votes, you know. And when that video is ready to be published, where can people find it? At my YouTube channel, which is Ward Carroll, 2Rs and 2Ls on YouTube. I do about two, sometimes three episodes a week. And my root note is military aviation, mostly naval aviation, carrier aviation.

It started as kind of a Tomcat channel. but then you run out of inventory. I tell all my stories. I get my friends to tell all their stories, and then we're out of stories. So it's like, oh, what else can we do? And current events is what I've pivoted into, you know, the war in Ukraine, a lot of coverage on that,

and then the war, the Israel, Hamas, and what I'm calling the Iranian proxy war, has become something that I cover, not on a daily basis. I'm not a news channel, and I don't want to be a news channel. I'll do history. You know, I'll do, hey, Houthis did this,

and the next day I'm doing the history of Billy Mitchell, you know, or the 10 of the most beautiful jets. So we keep it lively, keep it varied. And if you like military aviation, I dare say you'd like my channel. Ward, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet and walking me through all this. Okay, Matthew, my pleasure.

All right, Angry Planet listeners. As always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin O'Dell. It was created by myself and Jason Fields. If you like us, if you really like us, please head over at AngryPlanet.substack.com. Kick us $9 a month. Helps us keep the show going. You get early access in commercial-free versions to all the episodes. And you can get into the Discord channel.

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another conversation about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe. Until then.